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http://filereplica.com/
A file is split into n chunks, encoded such that any m chunks (m<n) can be used to rebuild the original file. It can use half of the alternative storage requirements, but requires cpu overhead.
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http://www.3tera.com/
3tera provide a grid platform to deploy "virtual appliances" on a "virtual datacentre" built on top of commodity hardware, similar to Amazon's EC2/S3.
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http://www.webpop.com/blog/posts/building-a-scalable-cms-on-the-rackspace-cloud
Interesting article on how webpop built their infrastructure on Rackspace's cloud. Includes links to a few useful tools (chef, wormly, new relic, nagios, ganglia, and others).
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http://www.capify.org/
Capistrano is a system built in Ruby to execute commands on many servers, in parallel via SSH. Config files, jobs, etc are written in Ruby.
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http://furquim.org/chironfs/
ChironFS is a fuse based filesystem that supports multiple backends. Writes are written to multiple hosts, reads come from a single host. It removes single points of failure and provides real time duplication / backup.
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http://xeround.com/
Tool that tries to automate the scaling and replication of MySQL database in "the cloud".
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http://collectd.org/
Collectd is a simple, small utility to log system load every 10 seconds. It's written in C so it's not a script and offers good performance.
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http://collectl.sourceforge.net/index.html
Collectl is a system monitoring tool. It logs a wide range of system metrics (disk, cpu, io, etc) and stores them in a variety of formats. It tries to cover all the bases unlike some other tools which focus on one or two methods.
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http://www.scalebase.com/
Another cloud based scale solution for MySQL, aims to simplify deploying MySQL "in the cloud".
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http://www.digital-web.com/articles/client_side_load_balancing/
An article describing a system that uses client side load balancing in a Web application. Voxlite is the example application built on Amazon EC2 and S3.
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http://engineering.gomiso.com/2011/01/04/easy-monitoring-of-varnish-with-munin/
Very useful walkthrough on setting up munin to monitor Varnish. Explains how to install and configure munin, which is very simple and very valuable.
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http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/
Yahoo!'s Exceptional Performance team evangelizes best practices for improving web performance.
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http://themomorohoax.com/2010/07/31/ruby-chef-tutorial
Handy article introducing chef and providing a few links. A little out of date now, but provides a useful intro.
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http://www.gidnetwork.com/tools/gzip-test.php
Very handy tool that will tell you if gzip or deflate is enabled on a url or not.
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http://haproxy.1wt.eu/
HAProxy is a TCP proxy / load balancer which will work for HTTP and a range of other applications. It advertises a small but expert user base and offers a range of very useful load balancing features. Apparently it competes with pound and ultramonkey.
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http://www.linux-ha.org/
Linux HA produce the Hearbeat application which is used in high availability clusters.
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http://wpmu.org/scaling-wordpress-wpmu-buddypress-like-edublogs/
Interesting write up by James at Incsub on how they handle scale on edublogs. Some good advice although a little light on specifics, a good starting point for research.
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http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1316852/alternative-to-memcached-that-can-persist-to-disk
Very interesting question that has lots of useful links on persistent object / value stores that are similar to memcache. Answer seems to be couchbase.
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http://kosmosfs.sourceforge.net/
An open source, distributed, failure resilient file system similar to GFS (from google). Supports automatic addition of nodes, redundancy, and so on.
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https://github.com/madalinoprea/magneto-varnish/
A magento varnish plugin that enables varnish caching on Magento sites.
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http://www.fabrizio-branca.de/magento-caching-internals.html
Very detailed article explaining how Magento implements its caching mechanism. It seems to be some custom classes layered on top of Zend's caching framework. Useful read.
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http://www.nbs-system.co.uk/blog-2/magento-optimization-howto-en.html
Very useful article outlining the broad basics of optimising Magento. Includes links to more detailed information and lots of config file examples. Very useful.
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http://wiki.systemimager.org/index.php/Main_Page
SystemImager is software which automates Linux installs, software distribution, and production deployment. It allows you to install complete system images to many hosts, from one image server. It's quite advanced, would take some learning.
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http://unixbhaskar.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/measure-website-response-time-through-curl/
Handy article explaining how to measure the (speed) time of an http request using curl. The key is -w "%{time_connect}:%{time_starttransfer}:%{time_total}\n" which outputs the times.
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https://beeznest.wordpress.com/2011/04/18/memcached-to-store-php-sessions/
Excellent article describing in depth how to have PHP store session data in memcached and the differences between the memcache and memcached implementations in PHP. Very useful.
